The Performance Edge: The iBook
May Be Cute And Inexpensive, But The PowerBook G4 Blows It Away
- A Performance Review

Sunday,
July 15, 2001

Below we present benchmarks for Apple current
G4 PowerBooks compared to the new 500MHz G3 iBook. We hope
to have more benchmark comparisons and a full review of iBook
for you by the end of the week or early next week. In almost
all of our tests the G4 PowerBooks, with their faster bus
speed (100MHz) and larger backside cache, greatly outclassed
the iBook, with its paltry 256K of cache and bus speed of
only 66MHz. And of course in applications
that take advantage of the G4, even the 400MHz PowerBook blew
the iBook away.

It is clear that on some of our tests, the iBook's
smaller backside cache made a great deal of difference. The
file we use for the AppleWorks scroll test and the search
and replace test (the tests where the iBook fell flat on its
face), is about a megabyte and a half in size. Thus only a
small portion of it can be held in the cache on the iBook,
while much more can fit into the megabyte of cache found in
the G4 PowerBooks. On smaller documents this won't be much
of an issue, and the fact that the cache on the iBook runs
at full processor speed, should come into play, giving you
a nice speed boost.

Drive speed was also significantly faster on
the PowerBooks and subjectively doing normal daily tasks on
the G4 PowerBooks seemed a tad more responsive than doing
similar work on the iBook.

The tests below are from our suite of real
world application tests. These tests feature a diverse
selection of applications commonly used by the Mac community.
The test suite was designed to render an accurate and well
rounded picture of a machine's performance. All of the tests
below (with the exception of the Quake III & Cinebench
2000 tests) were timed with a stopwatch. The times are then
converted to percentages relative to the Blue & White
G3/350 which is set to 100%. For all scores, higher numbers
are better. Absolute scores for most tests can be found below
this section.

Finder Tests

AppleWorks 6 Tests

Quake III Tests
These scores are relative. Actual frame rates for all machines
below this section.

Photoshop 6 & Other Data Crunching Tests

Encoding/Decoding Tests

Actual Scores - In Seconds except for the
Quake and CineBench 2000 scores where higher scores are better